Guerra e memoria. Paradigmi antichi e moderni, tra polemologia e memory studies (Paragrafo scritto da Elena Franchi: “Memory studies e classics”, 39-125)

War is a characterizing feature in ancient societies under several perspectives: political, institutional, social, economic, juridical, religious, and cultural. Accordingly, as the first part of this paper illustrates, modern studies in ancient polemology have developed along different, though complementary, currents: war is analyzed as both a crucial moment within military-political history and as a socio-economical phenomenon; it is considered in both its religious and widely cultural implications; and, most recently, it is investigated as a moment of ‘founding’ relevance concerning the social memory and collective identity of a given community. Starting from the seminal Cadres sociaux (1925) by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the investigation of collective memory in both ancient and modern communities has in fact undergone an outstanding theoretical development, which, as the second part of this paper precisely shows, has exponentially increased the directions of research within classics and the humanities in general. In the last two decades so-called ‘memory studies’ have been increasingly applied to the study of war and conflict. This contribution provides modern bibliography on war, on memory and on war and memory, and tries to pinpoint main themes on the study of war and memory for future research.